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Oracle Solaris At Least Has Intel KMS/DRI2

08-26-2011, 01:30 PM

Phoronix: Oracle Solaris At Least Has Intel KMS/DRI2

In the discussion about removing old Mesa drivers, non-Linux users may be affected by dropping these drivers for vintage graphics processors. As pointed out yesterday, the Solaris and BSD graphics drivers are in a sad state. This morning a NetBSD user requested that the Matrox and Voodoo graphics drivers remain in the tree, but they'll end up being dropped regardless since they are not maintained. There's also finally a comment by an Oracle developer about Solaris graphics drivers...

Who cares about video support when the system runs from the RS-232 console? Even plain old generic VESA SVGA support is adequate for running the installer or even an X session with a status monitor on it. Who runs stuff on a Solaris box that requires high-performance video?

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I don't think it is appropriate or nice to repeatedly mention that "Oracle ... have shafted open source communities" -- I am sure there is a better way to put it for referring to their previous work and Phoronix articles. Regardless of some of the hard corporate decisions, they do contribute to open source in a significant and constructive way.

And I am not a Oracle fan either, especially after their Java related Android lawsuits (and not to forget the openoffice and opensolaris happenings). I do hope that sooner or later they play along better with the ecosystem.

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Who cares about video support when the system runs from the RS-232 console? Even plain old generic VESA SVGA support is adequate for running the installer or even an X session with a status monitor on it. Who runs stuff on a Solaris box that requires high-performance video?

Well, if you want to develop FOR solaris ON solaris, it's nice to have at least 2d acceleration.

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If I hear one more thing about open source graphics drivers I think I'm going to throw up all over my keyboard.

It has moved way beyond obsession at this point.

It's like buying a BMW and then complaining that the manufacturer requires you to run it on gasoline for best performance.

If you go away and stop reading the articles, then you will not suffer from this problem any more.

Or perhaps you might want to look into purchasing a waterproof keyboard.

Or maybe you can look at what Intel is doing, they are developing a fine alternative to Nvidia and AMD. It's certainly not done, but they are surprisingly close to having a competitive product, and they don't have the obsessive desire to hide what they are doing. And besides, they can enlist the help of the community to find and fix bugs for them. Those of us stuck with Nvidia or AMD products have to wait for the vendor to get around to our problems.

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Those of us stuck with Nvidia or AMD products have to wait for the vendor to get around to our problems.

This puzzled me a bit. What are you waiting for AMD to do w.r.t. drivers on Solaris ? There are working open source drivers out there today, what they need is a Solaris-compatible implementation of the OS-specific bits in the open source kernel driver.

Are you suggesting that for some reason only AMD can port the open source code to Solaris ?

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This puzzled me a bit. What are you waiting for AMD to do w.r.t. drivers on Solaris ? There are working open source drivers out there today, what they need is a Solaris-compatible implementation of the OS-specific bits in the open source kernel driver.

Are you suggesting that for some reason only AMD can port the open source code to Solaris ?

Not at all.

I was responding to "If I hear one more thing about open source graphics drivers I think I'm going to throw up all over my keyboard."

We are going to hear about open source graphics drivers more and more as Intel's implementation becomes more stable.

And if I decide to run the Catalyst driver for whatever reason, then yes I do need to wait for them to fix the bugs.